Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The Geek Girl Thing

Eventually I was planning on writing some type of entry, well more than one, in which I discuss the concept of gender and being geeky. As much as I find appropriate fault with video games for lacking female PC's and non-stereotypical NPC's and as much as I wonder about how the lack of females may have influenced other girls growing up, I realize that there is an even greater lack of diversity when it comes to ethnicity, disability, sexuality and the like. It's not at all unusual to want your forms of entertainment to reflect what your life looks like or what you want your life to look like. Even for the many of us who use geeky culture as an escape from off-line problems, we still want to see something of ourselves in what we spend our time on. Yet, many of us don't get to see characters that we identify with in the games we play or even in the fandoms we participate in.

A few days ago the Geek Girls network posted an entryabout being geeky and female. I just visited the site today and caught the entry. This is the graphic that accompanied it.

Well, I was inspired to spend a quick twenty minutes of my break today to draw something up that reflects the people I have met over the course of my life. It's just a silly drawing, but I really wanted to get it out and then maybe re-work it later. I like to create quick layouts like this for bigger projects.

This doesn't encompass all types of geekdom. What I wanted to do was represent a variety of people and do so in a way that subtly showed gender ambiguity, different ages, ethnicities, disabilities and so on, but to not draw visual attention to any of those issues, just include them. I also wanted to subvert expectations. The original article that inspired this is well-worth a read.